our bodies for maps
by all these ghost towns
Summary: It never does for walkers of dreams to be left unattended. Or, Sif and Loki wake up after the ending of whatever it is they cannot define.


**A/N:** That in-between state of Post-_Thor_, Pre-_Avengers_, when Loki was Dead But Not Really.

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"Have you forgotten me already?"

Sif blinks her eyes once, maybe twice, but who's really counting? She's not; she hasn't been counting in ages. She doesn't think about numbers anymore. She doesn't think about quantity or numerals or the curve of an arc that dictates a way of labeling something as simple – simple, so simple; labeling it something and thinking that it will stay put if given a name. No, she doesn't count. She just blinks and drops her eyes from the dust that's billowing in patterns along the horizon. She blinks and she turns.

Loki's eyes are fraught with bruises. There's a shadow under each lash line and if she had trouble for more thought, more gifted thoughts other than blankness and the bitter taste that comes from a shock that is expected, she'd think there was something telling about the shade of purple against the color of his skin. But she doesn't have the trouble, she doesn't – she has too much – so she just notices absently a shape that speaks of a quartering moon, and she squints her eyes against the green of Loki's own.

"I can't say I know what you speak of." Sif tells him, and his lip curves up slowly on one side.

It's a frightful gesture, surely, but she can't think of that now, not when she has vowed to do just what he accused her of. Not when he's so smirking and so bruised, so empty. Not when the tree behind him has started to melt, and in the lines of her skin she feels a grit that burns. So she turns again, rubs her palms along the fabric of her trousers, and she waits.

"This place isn't exactly what I imagined." He tells her, and she can feel his step, as he closes the distance between them, more than she can hear it. Loki has always had the gift of silence: a tread graced with an absence of sound so startling, it had gotten the best of her more times than she cares to remember.

"Isn't it though?" Sif asks bluntly, as her eyes scan the buildings that spread out below them. There's a house, squat and plain, set out alone, apart from the rest. It is white and it has sanded doorways, and it is so reminiscent of her childhood home, that when the flame licks out of the window in bright, gasping strokes, Sif clenches her fists and steadies herself against the panic that's rising in her gut.

"I don't remember the burning. Is it new? I do not quite care for fire, if you so recall." Loki states, a hesitant questioning pulling his voice up at the end.

"I recall nothing that you care for." Sif spits and pulls her eyes from the house as the smoke curdles the tiling of the roof.

Loki laughs. A shiver runs ragged along her spine, and Sif brings her fingers to the cool metal of the blade at her hip.

"Oh, but you _do_." He says, falling into step just behind her – just outside of her reach, always just outside the edge of her reach – as she begins to walk.

Her footsteps sink faster into the sand as she quickens her pace, and she taps her nails long the ridge of the dagger in the staccato of her movement. The sound reminds her, as it stretches out in waves and comes back to her in song, that this isn't real. It reminds her, in broken, half-hearted pleas, that her feet, indenting and creating a path, are playing out a pattern that no one will follow.

"But I'm right behind you, milady," Loki says, speaking to her unvoiced question, and it's softer somehow; it makes her knees ache. "I cannot see beyond where you're headed. I cannot go where you do not."

Sif makes a noise of frustration in her throat and stops abruptly, spinning on her heels and lifting her chin, so defiant in its shape, to face him again. His hair has fallen from behind the edge of his helm, and a dark lock hangs low in front of his gaze. She wraps her eager, disobedient fingers around the sheath of her blade and hears the leather groan in response.

"Stop speaking in riddles!" She yells, but it comes out quieter than she had intended and she wants to push him down into the sand at her feet. She wants to push him and push him until he buckles and folds under her power. Until he bends to her will, because she is a warrior and he may be a prince, but he is still Loki, and she is still Sif.

"Why am I here?" She asks him, frustration giving into helplessness; she eyes a blinding glint of light at his shoulder where the sun – high and angry above their heads – catches the gold of his armor.

Loki stays quiet too long, and she watches as he swallows. There's something heavy beating fiercely against the backs of her ribs.

"Ask yourself." He says and pauses, she watches in a burdened daze as sweat beads in the hollow of his throat. "This is not my doing."

For some veiled reason his response makes her eyes burn. Sif blames it on the fortitude of the rays of the sun, and turns her face away from him once more, lowering her chin, once so brave and proud, letting her heavy eyes fall closed.

"Impossible." Sif speaks to the ground, and the sound of her voice is thick, as though prepared for winter: laden down with protective layering against a chill that leaks in along the sinews of muscle pressed flat against bone. "I am not the one who can impose myself, unwanted, on others' dreams."

She opens her eyes and trains her sight on his feet, and feels her skin bristle. There, hanging like a beacon above her, beating heat mercilessly into the strands of her hair, licking fire along her flesh, sits the sun: proud and demeaning in its violet-hued sky. Yet, despite the angry sun, Loki, standing tall and tangible, is void a shadow; he stands tall and lonely and unaccompanied.

Sif sucks in a breath too quickly and it breaks in shards on her teeth. She feels the absence of something so completely and entirely Loki, something so vibrantly _his_, like a wound opened fresh and gaping in the midst of a battle she'd expected to win. It splits her, so suddenly and raw, the corners of her lashes tremble, until she steels herself against the weakness he's cut into her.

"How are you here?" Sif asks, and she tries with all of her warrior's valor to ignore the hitch in her tone, the desperation of the plea. Loki's mouth turns up again, but it is a secondhand mirror of his former, and there is a vacancy behind his eyes.

"Sif." He says, and she can feel it slide along the rises of the bones of her neck. He reaches for her, and she is assaulted with the ghosted memory of the press of his mouth along the underside of her breast, the sting of his teeth along the bone of her hip.

She pulls away as she would in war, a defensive grace in the taught set of her shoulders, the line of her brow. He doesn't touch her, but she feels his fingers all the same, and she curses him for the brand once, a thousand times, endlessly – she doesn't know – in the hollow of her mind.

Loki blinks slowly and his eyes are so green, she feels ruptured from her navel to her feet, and she pulls her blade from its home.

"You cannot be here!" She says, and this time, this once, she is yelling: fiercely, with intent, and it echoes back in on itself blindly, again and again. She can hear the truth of her words as they batter the sides of her skull.

She looks to his feet again, the stolen shadow an imprint on her eyelids, and takes another step back.

"You cannot." It's quieter this time, choked in her throat against all the hope and the impossibility of keeping herself from wanting something she knows is a lie.

"Can't I?" Loki asks, and he sounds so unlike himself, so frayed and unsure – so very lost. She presses the edge of her freed dagger along the front of her thigh, steeling herself in turn.

Sif hates this. She hates the endless blaze of fire below them, the burning flare of sun above them. She hates that she knows what it means to be robbed of something when asked to remember its certainty. She hates that she wants; she wants and wants and wants, and she can never_have_. She will never have again, and for that, she hates _him_.

"You are not real." She tells him, as the steel of her blade eats through her trousers and into her skin. She feels blood, hot and readied, seep down her leg, in a long dance of ruby.

"Milady. _Sif_. Sif, please." Loki says, and Sif laughs, sounding too loud and too hoarse. Doesn't he _see_? He is asking her for something she cannot even begin to know how to give. How can she ever possibly know how to stop or start or find herself in the middle when there are portions upon portions of things without any purpose she's willing to tell?

Sif grits her teeth as Loki reaches up and pulls his horned helm from his brow. He drops it to the sand and she presses her dagger into her thigh with all her trained might; directs her strength – something that will not abandon her – to something she knows how to solve.

She presses and it tears her through, and his eyes – so green, so very green – go wide. It tears her through and she smiles like a frown, shuts her eyes against the pull of his own.

.

Sif opens her eyes and it is dark and she feels the weight of her bedclothes press in on her from all sides. She feels heavy yet empty, and she inhales too deeply to give her body some semblance of full.

She stares vacantly as shapes adjust in her sight, and she assesses. There is sweat settled wetly along her back, dampness on the ridge of her cheek. There is the weight of a shadow of something invading on all the room inside of her that she doesn't have left to share. There is a vastness that is encompassing her, a chasm she won't label, and she lets her breaths coat her ribs until the greediness subsides.

The edges of her vision blur hot and green, and she blinks and blinks until it fades. It fades and it aches, but she clenches her jaw, because it doesn't do to nurse losses. It doesn't do to dwell. Sif repeats this to herself, over and over, yet the responding echo bends itself around words she cannot voice aloud.

Loki is dead. Loki is dead.

Loki is _dead_ and Sif is alive, breathing in air to fill her too-large lungs, dreaming of things not forgotten in a too-large bed.

Loki is dead. He is a figment of melancholic thought, a beacon for a meandering mind clouded with betrayal; he is lost in a valley amongst all of the days he will never live.

Loki is dead and Sif sits up, pushes her hair from her face, and starts her day.

What else can she do? It doesn't do to tend to ghosts; not when they pull her apart and leave her amongst wreckage, fragmented and jagged and all for naught.

It just doesn't do.

.


End file.
